ABOUT US

Steve Friess is a 2011-12 recipient of the prestigious Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he will be studying the impact of the rapid expansion of Vegas-style gaming on Asia. He's a podcaster, author and Vegas-based freelance journalist who writes regularly for USA Today, The New York Times, Newsweek and many others. His column, "The Strip Sense" appears every Thursday in the Las Vegas Weekly. His books include "Gay Vegas" from Huntington Press and Knopf Mapguides' "Las Vegas."Friess co-hosts the weekly celebrity interview podcast The Strip Podcast "The Strip" with his husband, Miles Smith, the executive producer at KSNV-TV, Channel 3. For four years, Steve also co-hosted The Petcast with Las Vegas Sun education scribe Emily Richmond.

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Thursday, October 30, 2008

As momentous occasions go, this one should have been a big deal. And yet, until a friend who works there mentioned it last week, I had forgotten all about it. Bet you did, too.

In mid-October, the Bellagio turned 10. That’s a significant milestone, representing the fact that we’re a dizzying decade on from one of those pivotal turning points in Las Vegas history. The opening of a genuine luxury resort with great food, shopping and amenities was the most important step toward saying to the world, “Vegas isn’t tacky anymore.”

And yet in this city of parties for parties’ sake, of promotions for everything from the opening of terrible movies to the 1,000th production of Cirque du Whatever, what MGM Mirage opted to do to commemorate this milestone was rather, shall we say, anti-Vegas. Lame, too.

They did almost nothing. They threw a party in the employee dining service that involved a buffet of signature dishes from the property’s high-end restaurants and a DJ spinning live. They handed out a brochure with fun facts about Bellagio, showed the names of the 3,181 original employees still working there on an internal monitor and gave everyone a 10th-anniversary T-shirt. (I want one!)

That’s it. No star-studded party. No special deals for favorite guests. No souvenir chips. Not even a press release.

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THE STRIP FINALE

Below are links to the final episodes and last week of special editions of The Strip Podcast. Right-click on any of these to save and hear at your leisure. Otherwise, click on them and they should play. Enjoy, and thanks for the wonderful years.